The No-Ballad of Sweeney Todd

Got the soundtrack to Sweeney Todd this morning. The good - Johnny Depp sings better than Gerrard Butler. Sounds very David Bowie, actually. And Johanna sounds terrific. The bad - he doesn't sing as well as Len Cariou. And Helena Bonham Carter is NO Angela Lansbury. Obviously we'll see what it looks like on film. On the album everyone sounds like they're singing in small apartments but trying not to disturb the neighbors. Restraint is only good up to a point, Tim.

The inexplicable: It's not just the overture. There is NO Ballad of Sweeney Todd! I say again !!!!! And maybe #&$*! I'm piecing together the rumors I have heard and I think it comes up like this: The movie was going to have a chorus of ghosts. Well, the chorus is who sings the Ballad throughout the play. They didn't have time / budget / something like that to do the ghosts. So you cut the SIGNATURE SONG?!?! Um, doesn't that mean your movie isn't FINISHED? To add insult to injury they ghosts where going to be, among others, Tony Head and Christopher Lee! EDIT: Ok, the word is that since the ballad is always sung by a chorus, that it was too "stagey". Um... Whatev.

So, until I see the film, I will put this down as "Not as bad as I thought it would be." (Oh, and Alan Rickman's not half-bad!)

Worst Pies in London!

The opening titles to Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street are on line. Warning: These ARE disturbing. Not as much left to the imagination on screen as on stage.

What cracks me up is that there is STILL no SINGING in these titles. In the trailers there are a few snippets of Depp kind of singing "there's a hole in the world like a great black pit". But they're not really going out of their way to say MUSICAL.

One of my favorite movie quotes from the Harrison Ford remake of Sabrina was thus:

Mack: The most difficult tickets to get will be for a Broadway musical.
Linus Larrabee: So?
Mack: That means that the performers will periodically dance about and burst into song.

Anyway, brace yourselves. (If the Zombie song disturbed you, don't click here.) Here it is.

Attend the Tale!

Well. This is alarming looking...

I just saw that Christopher Lee is "Gentleman Ghost". So there are obviously some liberties. UPDATE!!!! Anthony "Giles" Head will also be one of the singing ghosts!

Ron Weasley's Rat (hey, he was in Chicken Run? Had no idea! - Also as a rat, btw) will be Beadle Bamford. There WILL be SINGING in this movie, no? So that's three Potter alumni. (But can any of them, well, make pleasant pitch changes with thier voices set to a tune?)

A Pious Vulture of the Law

...who with a gesture of his claw
removed the barber from his plate...

Well, I don't know if Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd will be any good, but it will be scary.

I give you Judge Turpin:

Can Rickman SING? (Ok, can ANY of this cast sing?)

The King of the Barbers, the Barber of Kings

Well, this project just gets more and more disturbing. Yes, I'm looking forward to it, that's not the point.

A Wooden Leg Named Smith!

Good heavens. Did anyone else know about this?

(Don't you just love obscure in-joke subject titles? I could have said "Yes! Well I don't mind that quite so much. At any rate, it's TRADITIONAL." Well, it made ME laugh. And I love to-- never mind.)

p.s. The editors appologize for the flagrant and obviously intentional non-use of Supercalifraglisticexpialidocious in this post. The writer's nose has been given a tweak and he has been told that he is bad.

So long, farewell, Qapla', goodnight!

Ok, this is the weirdest thing I've heard today!

Ex-Klingons J.G. Hertzler (Martok) and Robert O'Reilly (Gowron) are joining several of the surviving members of the von Trapp family, made famous by the Oscar-winning film The Sound of Music, in a low-budget Christmas film.

The two Deep Space Nine actors will appear in The von Trapp Children Christmas Movie, according to ncFilm, which reports on movies shooting in the North Carolina area. The film will shoot at Durham's Studio in the Woods as well as on location in Greensboro, NC and Montana, with a start date of December 2006.

Four children descended from the original von Trapp family singers - Sofia, 18, Melanie, 16, Amanda, 15, and Justin, 11 - have been touring as a singing act but are taking time off for the film, according to Reuters. The four are grandchildren of Werner von Trapp, the younger of the two boys portrayed in The Sound of Music (there renamed Kurt).

Other cast members include Jerry Mathers, Kathy Lamkin and Megan Blake. The film, budgeted at less than $4 million, is being directed and shot by a team of former Star Trek visual effects specialists, including a cinematographer, production designer and composer. The Trek team members were acquaintances of the CEO of Studio in the Woods, a former state government liaison for public events including Star Trek conventions.

The von Trapp children will sing in the film, though it is not a musical but a road trip movie. Mathers' character narrates the story, written by Paul Shapiro. Werner, Agathe (Liesl) and Maria (Louisa) are the surviving members of the original von Trapp Family Singers, who fled Nazi-occupied Austria in the 1930s. The film is slated for a 2007 release.

I... I just don't know what to say. Klingons, Leave it to Beaver, and Sound of Music. Oh my!